Feature
The Gist
- Phygital experiences. The blending of physical and digital shopping creates opportunities like AR, digital twins, and social commerce growth.
- AI-driven personalization. Future AI innovations will include empathetic personalization, autonomous shopping, and predictive customer assistants.
- Brand authenticity. Human connection and storytelling, like United Airlines’ Real Good Stories campaign, drive customer loyalty and trust.
- Unified commerce. AI-powered shopping assistants and personalized in-store experiences will shape the next wave of unified commerce strategies.
Justin Racine, principal of commerce strategy at Perficient, is a forward-thinking voice in the ecommerce industry. As one of CMSWire's 2024 Contributors of the Year and our first to be profiled over the next two weeks, Justin consistently delivers insights that resonate with brands navigating the evolving digital landscape.
And not only that, be brings a super unique, personal touch to his columns — often weaving real-life experiences into value business lessons.
From exploring the transformative potential of AI to redefining authenticity in customer engagement, Justin brings a mix of deep expertise and personal experience to his work. This Q&A showcases his thoughts on phygital experiences, AI-driven personalization and how brands can foster meaningful connections with their customers.
Editor's note: We've got a few more profiles of our Contributors of the Year to go. Enjoy them over the next two weeks.
Ecommerce Evolution
CMSWire: What emerging trends in digital shopping do you see shaping the future of ecommerce, and how should brands adapt to stay competitive in this evolving landscape?
Justin: Short answer, our entire world becomes "phygital" — that’s right, the blending of physical and digital experiences to cook up a perfectly crafted meal of shopping workflows that delight and surprise customers.
Long answer, while the concept of phygital will start to take shape in the form of augmented reality, product visualizers and digital twins, it’s more likely that brands first start with expanding their presence into new ecommerce channels, like social media. According to eMarketer – social commerce revenue will pass $100 Billion in 2025, a staggering 22% growth path from their last modeling in 2023.
While some social channel futures are unknown, like TikTok, many other channels still continue to surge. You’ll start to see the entrance of product placement and buying opportunities within YouTube and eventually other streaming platforms like Netflix will start to adopt the ability to shop within your favorite TV shows.
Additionally, you will start to see large brands build out customer community efforts in an attempt to compete with smaller, scrappy niche brands. Consumers are human beings, and human beings love to interact with other humans who share similar mindsets, values and traits; the onset of these new digital communities will spawn enhanced elements of anthropomorphism between customer and brand, helping to create elevated levels of connection and ultimately, will drive increased ecommerce revenues.
Related Article: The Future of Ecommerce: Creating Blended Experiences
AI-Driven Personalization
CMSWire: Platforms like Spotify have revolutionized personalization. What do you think are the next big opportunities for brands to leverage AI for creating hyper-personalized customer experiences?
Justin: Ah yes, good ol’ daylists, one of my favorite examples of human like hyper personalization. In fact, as I write this, Spotify has cooked up some "Relaxing house Ibiza Monday morning" vibes for me.
As for what’s next? I think it’s a mix of Spotify’s daylists and Elons Optimus robot, each of which I’ve covered this year.
Listen, the world of hyper personalization will start to become more and more humanized, and more and more predictive. Assisted shopping and autonomous shopping will be up next. AI will start to intimately start to understand your buying patters, preferences and previous decisions to start ordering products for you without any prompt.
From there, AI will start to move into something I like to call "empathetic personalization," where AI can start to understand sentiment, tone and emotion. Where AI models can start to recommend products or services that are based upon how we are feeling or acting within that specific day or environment.
Then, at some point, we all will have our own personalized shopping AI buddy, helping us with everything from scheduling the kids' summer activities to buying and booking travel for spring break. AI personal assistants will become the future way to do anything and everything.
Related Article: How AI and Data Analytics Drive Personalization Strategies
Retail Innovation
CMSWire: With advancements like Tesla’s Optimus robot and other emerging retail tech, how do you envision the physical and digital retail worlds merging to deliver seamless customer experiences?
Justin: Let’s say you’re walking down the street, and you see a pair of shoes that you absolutely love. Luckily for you, you happen to be wearing your Meta Ray-Ban sunglasses that cue up a blended augmented view of the shoes, where you can see where you can purchase them and also see what they would look like on your feet by simply looking down.
That’s the future of retail.
Even more than that, retail will become more and more connected and unified. Brands will invest to leverage a 360 view of customer activity to personalize across the channel continuum. Once in-store beacon technology starts to take off, retailers will be able to personalize the entire shopping experience based upon where a customer is standing in the store, what they previously browsed through on that stores website, and what they previously purchased.
All while giving them a product visualizer mirror to see how those pair of pants would look without having to run to the dressing room to try them on.
Brand Authenticity and Connection
CMSWire: As customers demand more authenticity from brands, especially during key shopping seasons, what strategies do you recommend for companies looking to humanize their approach without losing scale?
Justin: Easy. Find ways to get your customers connected to each other.
One of my biggest takeaways from Shoptalk fall this past year was the importance of brands fostering opportunities of community and connection. Of course, doing this at scale provides a unique set of challenges, but let me give you an example.
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On a recent United Airlines flight, before we took off and after the safety video, a new type of video popped up on the screen. The video showed a young man who had just beaten cancer, and was on a United flight to a tropical location with his family to celebrate. In the video, they show the pilot for his flight coming on the microphone and sharing his story, stating that his wife had just beat cancer as well and that he wanted to celebrate his journey.
That. Do exactly what United Airlines is doing.
United Airlines calls this campaign Real Good Stories, and its injection of humanized, real world stories into their flight provides an exceptional opportunity to weave emotion into their customers experience. Regardless of if you’re traveling for business, for a wedding or simply just a vacation, you can relate with the story on the screen.
That resonation curates anthropomorphism between the flyer and United Airlines, helping to humanize the brand, and to give you, the customer, an elevated perception of the airline that will create customer loyalty and future purchase intent.
Humanizing at scale really just comes down to understanding your consumer and knowing what type of humanized touchpoints will resonate the most.
Remember, connectivity strategies are only as good as the channel in which you provide them. Be sure to understand what channels your customers are active in first, then determine which stories you want to tell. And always, ALWAYS do the best you can to track the results to offer up pivots and lessons learned.
AI’s Role in Unified Commerce
CMSWire: How can brands use AI and other technologies to create a unified commerce strategy that aligns with customer expectations across channels?
Justin: I talked a little about this above, but once all of us actually have our own personal shopping assistants, the world of commerce becomes much more centralized an unified.
Think to the times where you consciously recognize that you need to go to the store to buy this, or buy that; personal shopping agents will be there to help build shopping lists, remind you of what you need to purchase and at times, purchase for you without your intervention. Taking it a step further, AI will start to have visibility into elements like product stock status and availability, giving you options and nudging you to make a purchase so that you receive the products in time.
“Hi Justin, remember – your calendar shows you have holiday party next Thursday, if you want to order your Santa costume and have it before then, please order today. Would you like me to place that order for you?”
That’s the future.
Finally, AI will start to learn who we are not only as customers, but as human beings. AI will look to synthesize all of our buying behaviors, interests, intent and preferences to recommend products and services that are most in market for us at any given time.
To be honest, this concept seems a bit, well, out of this world. I’m interested to see how consumers react to the idea of AI technology knowing more about us than we know about ourselves. In my mind, it can go one of two ways.
First, consumers could reject this idea and choose to push back against the onset of AI technology being so intimately tied to our every action, every move, every purchase.
Or, secondly (and more likely in my mind), consumers start to adopt AI technology and become dependent on its insights, its understanding and its goal to give us the best possible cross-channel, unified experience.
Will we be as reliant on AI as we are on our smartphones? Yes.
Will AI become the dominate race on this planet and take over the world? The jury is still out on that.
CMSWir: Tell us something fun about Justin outside of his professional world (even though our readers know A LOT about that).
Justin: I’m in my late 30s, and I’m in the best physical and mental shape of my life.
If you’ve read my work, you know that my style of writing leans in pretty heavy on sharing my own personal experiences and life lessons as sort of cornerstones to the pieces I produce. I feel as though it helps writing become more relatable and digestible and, at times, provides a bit of comic relief at my expense to experiences that happen to me (some good, some not so good).
But, that makes answering questions like this even more challenging. However, if my first sentence attempt at foreshadowing did its job, and you’ve made it this far ...
Let me explain.
I moved to Austin directly in the middle of COVID, I mean RIGHT in the middle. Didn’t know a person. Didn’t know the city. But one thing I did know, this city is ACTIVE.
Listen, I was an active kid growing up and into college, playing as many sports as I could get my hands on. But as things tend to happen, some of those hobbies started to slip, and it wasn’t until I moved to the capital city that I rekindled the passion of being active. Most of my close friends in the city are extremely active; in fact two of them are training for the Austin Marathon currently which is fun for me, because I enjoy training with them, spending time with them and watching them reach their own goals and journeys. That’s what fills my cup.
Here’s my point: it’s never too late to invest in yourself. We all should be doing this. Just like big brands invest time in their customers, you need to invest time in the things that fill your cup, that get you up early on a weekend morning to go for a run when it’s cold and rainy.
Life has a funny way of giving you not what you want, but what you need. And if I’ve learned anything this past year it’s this. There’s no substitute for spending time on the things that make you feel good, and sometimes the only way to get there is to go through hard, challenging things like training for a marathon, moving to a new city or spending time each day on activities that allow a late 30s guy to feel like he’s in his 20s.
In all seriousness, I’d like to thank Brice Dunwoodie, Dom Nicastro and Sheryl Hodge of CMSWire for their support and enthusiasm for my contributions. For me, writing is one of my favorite creative outlets, and I’m humbled and grateful to receive this recognition again. If you read a headline, a sentence, a paragraph or an entire article this past year, thank you for your support, and thank you for spending some time thinking differently about the world and how brands can better create experiences that bring us as a humanity closer together.
As Stephen King once said, “Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the readers."
Check out some of Justin's content from 2024:
- 5 Digital Shopping and Customer Experience Trends for Big Brand Wins in 2025
- Shoptalk Fall: Unveiling the Most Important Retail Trends of 2024
- Why the Tesla 'Optimus' Robot Changes Everything About Customer Experience
- From Gutenberg to Google: AI's Role in Shaping This Century
- What Spotify AI Playlists Teach Us About Exceptional CX
